None of you are real, huh?

Are you an artist who wants to draw a millipede but doesn't want to draw a lot of legs? Would it help if I introduced you to the pincushion millipede, which only has 12 pairs of legs? Plz, I want to purchase your millipede art.

If we're sharing weird pupae I can contribute this one.

Hmm...yes....YES

They're the blobby, somewhat pinecone looking things in the water.

Yeah man, I don't think the state will let me purchase COCAINE even if I pinky promise to just use it to preserve freshwater bryozoans.

On the left: what they think Apheloria corrugata looks like. On the right: what it actually looks like. Was the editor on vacation? No; these for-profit science megacorps just want to scam you and your institutions out of money in the most efficient way possible.

FYI avoid Springer Nature as much as possible. It's pioneering new avenues for slop, such as this book, translated with AI: link.springer.com/book/10.1007.... Complete with an AI cover, which of course is nonsense. Also includes a 4 page chapter on millipedes which includes a misidentified photo.

I texted these snails to my wife and said "us." It was a big hit in our household.

Update: we have a cocoon! Now to play the waiting game.

Man I love finding random bugs. I flipped a log searching for a centipede but found a spider with an ectoparasite instead! It's been two days: the spider is goop and the larva is about 8 mm long. Cross your fingers that I can rear the wasp!

Hard not to stop and admire the pink lady's slipper orchid when you find one! This one comes to you from the edges of a swamp in eastern Virginia.

This is the SEVENTH pauropod from this leaf litter sample and it's only been running a few days. A get for the record books, people. Genus is Eurypauropus, size is like...1.5 mm.

I hate this type of vial so much. Constricted neck. Stopper material always cracks or does something weird. Also produces sticky juice. Begone from me.

It doesn't even have to be in an untouched natural habitat either. This seep oozed out of a hillside below a road and adjacent to a recreational park.

Come on, just look at him. Little weirdo minding his own business in the groundwater and saturated interstitial soil spaces. Then during periods of high water tables the earth vomits him up through a seep, whence a most unlikely creature plucks him from the mucky leaves.

A few snail shells for you, before bedtime. Photo 1: Gastrocopta ?pentodon Photo 2: Pomatiopsis lapidaria Photo 3-4: Discus whitneyi

Good; that is what I want.

Lolol seeing these posts separated by one minute got me good.

I always think of Gordo's Bistro from Skies of Arcadia whenever I hear gastropub. Because that's the type of gastropub I would want to visit.

There's just enough shell left of this snail for a novice (me) to identify it. Mesomphix cupreus from Rockbridge Co, VA. Its common name is the copper button, and is quickly becoming one of my favorite snails.

Here I got you another photo collage of a Tanaupodid mite! I even added a scale bar! Minute little bulborbs crawling around the wintertime leaf litter. I collected this one from leaf litter in the woods behind my old elementary school in southeast Ohio.

Check it out, I found a sandworm from Arrakis in my leaf litter from southern Virginia. (It's a snipe fly larva in the family Rhagionidae.) Check out those beautiful silver tracheal tubes!

It's Tanaupodidae season! These large (~2 mm), winter-lovin' mites are only out now, so go look under your local logs, leaves, and boulders to see the mammoth mites near you! I've gotten them in all my Berleses since Dec 16 (all two of them). www.inaturalist.org/observations...

Case in point: this small springtail is full of tiny worms.

It's easy to overlook tiny soil fauna, small and burrowed away, determined to avoid us. Even when sampling for them specifically, your eyes must want to see them, or they will be missed.